Teacher Inspired Her Students And Her Colleagues

SANFORD — Elmira Hall's teaching career began when Seminole County was mostly rural. The schools were segregated, few women taught math, and teachers reigned in the classroom.

Hall, who after 36 years is retiring this month, was part of integration. She saw educational theories come and go. She watched the school population grow and the attendance districts change.

Through it all, she initiated thousands of young people into the mysteries of fractions and decimals, multiplication and division. On the way, she became an inspiration to those she taught and a mentor to other teachers, her colleagues and former students said.

''She had the ability to make the subject matter interesting and accessible,'' Steven Wright said.

Now an English instructor at Seminole Community College, Wright was among Hall's first students at Crooms Academy in Sanford in the early 1960s.

Wright remembers Hall, a 1951 graduate of Crooms, as a stern but fair instructor who encouraged a sense of family in her classroom.

Like Wright, many of Hall's students have grown up to be educators. Her eldest daughter is a teacher in Sanford and her youngest is a math major at Hall's alma mater, Florida A&M University.

Other former students are now doctors, lawyers and business people. Former students did the electrical work and landscaping on the house she and her husband of 38 years, George, built a couple of years ago.

Hall's colleagues learned a lot from her, too.

''As a new teacher, she was the person I could bank on,'' said Martha Marie, a teacher at Indian Trails Middle School who came to the area nearly 15 years ago. Hall was ''an anchor, someone who was always willing to help.''

What Marie most admired in Hall was her insistence on finding something positive about students - even the ones who were hard to handle.

''I felt that's what I should do,'' Marie said, ''find the best in a person and capitalize on it.''

As a teen-ager, Hall said, she was so eager to learn that she frequently took her books to church for evening services. Her determination to learn carried over into her career at a time when most of the job interviewers were older men.

''They looked at me like I was from another planet because I wanted to teach math,'' she said.

At one point, her husband complained to her mother that ''dittos (the forerunner of photocopies) were coming between us,'' she said. ''I corrected that.''

When one of the nation's biggest social upheavals - integration - came to Seminole County in the late 1960s, Hall was among the first black teachers to enter formerly all-white schools.

Things generally went smoothly, she said, but people who are raised a certain way sometimes find it hard to realize how another person feels. At Lyman High School during the 1968-69 school year, she and the few other black teachers were added to the end of the teachers' list rather than being alphabetized with everyone else. On payday, they got their checks last.

When they explained how being excluded made them feel - and when Hall told school officials they could mail her check because she wasn't going to stick around and be last - the list was alphabetized for everyone.

In the classroom, Hall has found techniques that work, and she prefers to stick with them. For instance, she still groups her students by ability, maintaining that they learn faster and don't feel intimidated or held back by those who learn at a different pace.

Hall also feels strongly that kids shouldn't use calculators until they know their multiplication tables, and that they should master that skill by the time they enter sixth grade.

But she is also open-minded. She admits being skeptical about team teaching, but learned to like it over the past four years.

She feels a certain sadness about the attitudes of today's students. Kids today are bright but lazy, she said, ''because they're not made to perform as they should.''

Students used to be concerned about learning. Now they have a ''make me'' attitude, she said, ''and it's getting harder and harder to make them. . . . It's time to give up and let some younger people give it a try.''

Still, she has some advice for her successor. The new teacher should be someone who cares about the young people. A teacher who doesn't, she said, has no reason for being a teacher.